What a weekend. Much to the chagrin of my beleaguered girlfriend, I signed up to be part of Startup Weekend here in Atlanta. I haven't had the chance to do one of these events before and it was a lot of fun. I want to thank the organizers and the great people at ATDC for holding a great event.

As many of you have known for a while, I've been running my AgiliTrain training company focusing on technologies like Silverlight, WPF and the Web. My interest in training isn't going away, but I've yearned to work with a small group of thought leaders to help companies in more innovative ways. With this goal in mind, I am launching Wilder Minds.

The vision for Wilder Minds is to be a complete solution for companies who are trying to move to new technologies (like Windows 8, HTML5/JS, Mobile Development, node.js, etc.) Instead of just doing training, we're expanding to help in three primary ways:

I’ve heard a lot of people wonder what’s going on behind my privacy curtain. If you follow me on twitter or notice the time of some of my blog posts, you might conjecture that I never sleep. That argument is not completely without merit. But it got me to thinking that it would be good if I wrote a short post explaining the types of things I do.

It’s been a long nine-months and I am excited to be able to talk about what I’ve been working on for the first time. I am working with a small team of people to build a new set of products. But unlike what I’ve been doing in the past, this new set of products is not for developers...

I have a problem. When I (or my customers) are being taken advantage of it makes me so very angry...probably angrier that it should. I am in Hartford, CT this week to teach a course for a corporate client. One of the recommended hotels is a Crown Plaza Hotel at $199/night. It was the cheapest of the three hotels they selected. While I find expensive hotel rooms ostentacious, usually I can figure out why they are so expensive: excelent service, nice rooms, etc. The room I am in right now is actually about 1/2 the size of the $75/night hotel I stayed in a couple of weeks ago. Not just the size, but its a bit shabby actually.

While I don't agree with much of what they say, especially that MS code is poorly written and buggy; I am convinced that MS has lost their way with what the story around Longhorn really is. They announced so many interesting ideas in Longhorn that have been either dropped (WinFS, Monad) or moved it to pre-longhorn (Indigo, Avalon, Aero), that they have lost the momentum story.

I just joined Magenic Technology as a Consultant and they put me at a client right away. Its been so long since I commuted to a job that it was kinda wierd getting up at 6am and driving for an hour. After a couple of years of getting up at the crack of noon and working till late into the night, this is a great change...of course after a couple weeks of this, I may not like it but we'll see.

I haven't been this annoyed with an online game in years. I've goten about 17 of the logos, but stuck on the last six. The only nasty thing is that if you want the answers, they charge cash! So please help me out with B, D, F, H, L, N, O, P, Q, U, V, and Y.